Chapter 53: Fighting the Dragon Warlord’s Pupil
The bracket burned down fast after that.
Round three put Aidan against a fire-fisted Epic-rank who liked to shout. He put the man’s armor to zero in eleven seconds with a single well-placed pulse and let the crowd write it off as another lucky matchup.
Round four was a stone-caller who tried to bury him. Aidan slipped every pillar, tapped the man out in under twenty, and stepped back into the crowd before anyone could finish clapping.
He kept every win small and quiet. Fast, clean, forgettable. Nothing that made a watcher lean in and think too hard.
By the time the overseer’s voice rolled across the basin again, the hundred and twenty-two had bled down to eight.
"Quarterfinals," the overseer announced. "The draw is set."
New pairings bloomed in the air above the two fields.
Aidan’s name settled over Field One, and beside it, a second name lit up that made a murmur run through the whole basin.
Draego Voss.
’There it is,’ Aidan thought, calm on the surface, a slow spark of interest kindling underneath. ’The Dragon Warlord’s boy.’
The broad, dragon-touched man he had clocked at the very start stepped up across the formation line from him.
Up close, Voss was a wall. Faint bronze scales traced his forearms and throat, and his eyes held that slow reptilian calm, the patience of something very large that had never once needed to hurry.
"So you’re the curious little SSS," Voss rumbled. "You unraveled a veteran with clever hands. I watched. It was pretty." He rolled one heavy shoulder. "Cleverness runs dry against me. I don’t have seams for you to pick."
Aidan smiled and said nothing.
[Tom: He’s got a real technique inside him. A Spirit Art. Master, this one won’t fold like the others.]
[Arthur: Ooh, a dragon. Can I eat him after?]
’No, Arthur. And good. I was getting bored of easy.’
’Besides,’ Aidan thought, as the Spirit Armor wrapped him at a fresh hundred, ’I came to this tournament to win a world. But I also came to grow. New enemies are the best lab there is.’
He had a whole arsenal of aspects that could be woven into fearsome techniques and spells. This was the place to try.
"Begin!"
Voss moved first, and he was not slow at all.
He crossed the ring in one thunderous stride and threw a scaled fist wrapped in raw draconic strength, a blow that would have caved a lesser fighter’s armor in a single hit.
Aidan bent aside on a hum of charge and let it pass.
Voss flowed with it, pivoting into a second strike, then a third, each one heavier than the last, the ground cracking under his stance. This was no nervous boy or patient turtle. This was trained, dragon-touched power with real speed behind it.
’Good,’ Aidan thought, weaving between the blows. ’Now let’s see if the old tricks hold up.’
He tried the metal-and-lightning tap he had used before, driving it into Voss’s flank.
It rang off the bronze scales and barely scored a point. Voss’s dragon-hardened body shrugged it off the way Korr’s earthsteel had, but there were no seams here to pry. The scales were living plate, whole, and flowing.
[Garen: 100/100]
[Voss: 99/100]
"Told you," Voss said, and inhaled.
His chest swelled, scales flaring, and he loosed a breath of bronze draconic force in a wide, roaring cone that swallowed half the ring.
Aidan blurred out of its path, but the edge of it still clipped his armor and stung two points off him.
[Garen: 98/100]
’Alright. The taps won’t cut him, and he punishes anyone who stays close.’ Aidan’s mind ran cold and quick. ’So I don’t fight him close. I build something new.’
’Let’s go with heavy aoe attack from all sides.’
He reached into the aspects he had been saving, the ones the tournament had never seen, and pulled up Wind.
The air around him stirred, gathering, thickening into a current only he controlled. Then he threaded Spin through it, setting the whole mass turning, faster and faster, a rising column of screaming air.
Last, he laced Blade into every layer of it.
The turning wind grew edges. Thousands of them, thin and keen, riding the spiral. What had been a gust became a vertical storm of cutting arcs, humming with a sound like a thousand drawn knives.
’Let’s call you Windshear Spiral,’ Aidan named it, the way he named all his best work.
He swept his arm, and the vortex tore off him and across the ring at Voss.
Voss braced behind crossed, scaled arms, trusting his dragon plate to weather it the way it had weathered everything.
The Windshear Spiral hit him and did not stop at his skin.
The blades were too fine and too many to shrug. They didn’t need a seam. They wore at the scales all at once, a hundred cuts a second raking across his whole guard, and his Spirit Armor started shedding points in a steady bleed.
[Voss: 99 to 91 to 83 to 74...]
Voss’s calm finally cracked.
He growled, driving forward through the storm, dragon-strength forcing him step by step against the shredding wind.
’He’s still coming.’ Aidan almost grinned. ’Tough. But I’m not finished building.’
He fed the spiral more, and while it held Voss pinned and bleeding, he did the thing he had really come here to learn.
He layered a second aspect into a live technique, mid-fight, on instinct.
Metal, drawn thin as wire, spun into the heart of the wind. Then a single vein of Lightning to charge it. The loose, wide vortex began to tighten, coiling in on itself, all those scattered blades pulling into one narrowing, howling point.
A drill. A spiral drill of wind and edge and charged metal, aimed at one spot on Voss’s chest.
Then Aidan reached out with Electromagnetism, caught the bronze scales over Voss’s heart, and pulled, dragging his guard open for half a breath.
Half a breath was enough.
’Spiral Drill,’ Aidan thought, and let it go.
The compressed vortex screamed forward and bored into the gap he had opened, all its cutting force concentrated into a single turning point that the dragon plate could not spread or blunt.
It punched through Voss’s Spirit Armor in one long, grinding instant.
[Voss: 74 to 0.]
The tally hit zero.
Voss staggered back a full step, his armor scattering into pale motes, standing there whole and unhurt with his scaled fists still half-raised, staring at the empty air where the drill had been.
"Match over," the overseer announced, and for the first time its flat voice seemed to pause. "Field One goes to Garen. Time elapsed, thirty-nine seconds."
The basin went dead silent.
An unknown SSS had just beaten a direct pupil of the Dragon Warlord. Not by a fluke.
Then the murmur broke loose, low and stunned, rolling through the whole crowd.
"What the...I wasn’t expecting that. Dragon Warlord’s pupil lost so easily?"
"But that had some serious power. Even a peak Epic-rank couldn’t break that scale defense of Voss, but that kid did it quite easily."
"Yeah, that technique was insane! How did he pull it off?"
"How many powers is he controlling? His talents are a mystery. I couldn’t figure out much."
"That’s a monster wearing SSS clothes. Does anyone know his background?"
"Garen..."
Aidan let the aspects settle quietly and stepped back over the line, breathing easy with a leisurely smile.
Across the ring, Voss did not scowl. He looked at his own scaled hands, then at Aidan, and something slow and respectful settled behind his reptilian calm.
"You are strong," Voss said quietly. "It looked easy for you to draw out power beyond Epic rank." He inclined his heavy head, the way one hunter honors another. "My master would want to meet you, unless, of course, you already have a Master."
"I do have one." Aidan faintly smiled.
"I see."
Beyond Voss, at the crowd’s edge, the tall woman with the pale scales along her jaw was no longer bored, no longer merely curious.
She watched Aidan with a still, sharpened focus, the way a predator finally recognizes another predator, and her eyes did not leave him.
[Jovan: The sister sees you clearly now.]
’Yeah. She’s the real one to watch.’
[Tom: Semifinals, probably. You’ll get her soon.]
Aidan glanced once at the woman, met her stare without flinching, and let a small, honest smile touch his mouth.
’Come on then. Let’s see what I build for you.’
